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Platform consulting is the key your business needs to unlock digital transformation in a post covid-19 world, and here is why...
What is a Platform?
Put simply, a platform is a group of technology-based tools at the centre of your business that aid efficient business operations, market effectively, and enable sales and service teams to provide an optimal customer experience. You may also hear this referred to as your "tech stack".
A platform plays an active role in coordinating how multiple systems, people and departments work together. You can picture a platform as your central hub, with spokes connecting other products to its centre. The hub brings those disparate systems together and orchestrates them in a common mission.
A well implemented and properly integrated platform is the epicentre for a 360-degree view of everything important to your bottom line.
It automates processes, reports KPI's in real time and cuts overheads in laborious tasks; freeing up your team to work on revenue generating tasks due to the timely data and insight provided in your 360-degree view.
What is Platform Consulting?
Platform consulting provides expertise and solutions for businesses that seek to maximise their technology and people platforms utility and success.
In the last 5-10 years the number of applications and apps your teams use daily has grown and grown.
In Marketing alone, it is now estimated there is a choice of 5000 - 8000 individual tools with triple digit growth in tools and complexity every year since 2011.
Platform consulting helps you see the wood from the trees, assesses gaps in your capability and where possible, consolidates duplication and removes cost.
Can't my IT department do that?
Sometimes yes, but most often no. Unless you have 50+ people within your IT department most of your IT headcount is probably focused on keeping the lights on, servers up and laptops running smoothly; not on solution and platform architecture.
While there is great value in those functions, the team are unlikely to be thinking about the bigger operational picture and the interlinking of data, people, process, and tech that keeps the business growing.
Platform consulting is business-focused and business-led.
What exactly is digital transformation?
Buzzwords apart, digital transformation comes in three areas. People, Process and Technology - a balanced interlinked system where you can't influence change in one without considering ramifications across all.
A quality digital transformation initiative considers all three, but is underpinned by a platform seamlessly connected. Digital transformations utilise technology to reduce friction between your people and process making them more efficient.
How can Code Tonic help? Should I not just phone up a big consultancy or my Digital Agency?
From small 3 people teams to global corporations with thousands of staff, we have helped teams large and small in multiple sectors accelerate their digital transformation.
There is no one size fits all approach for anyone, but our knowledge is routed in running businesses of our own generating years of experience - we are not graduates coached from afar billed out at a £1,000 a day!
We are also not a digital agency, we have a grounding across the full business spectrum, from marketing, to sales, to operations, to technology; not a marketing service that also happens to do websites and e-comm. We think end-to-end, not in silos.
We help you understand the consequences a decision can have on your people, process, and strategy in order to help you implement not just the technology, but any associated changes across your business.
What do we mean? Well, you don't want your e-comm software restricting your choices in how you do fulfilment now, or in 6 months as you grow. You also don't want a niche tech choice causing a data silo meaning you can't get data from your retail stores, into your CRM or accounting software. Data silos cause friction in your internal processes, which easily leak into customer service.
When we make a recommendation, you can often bet we have already trialled it out on our own products and services first.
We can help you:
- Save money by having us identify apps and processes that aren't providing sufficient ROI
- Grow better by more effectively synchronising and centralising data in your platform applications
- Provide an improved customer experience by streamlining internal roadblocks
- Allow sales to work in conjunction with marketing, and with customer service and operations.
- Increase agility in your decision-making by providing a 360-degree view of all core business metrics
- Help you determine which technologies to replace, integrate, or leave untouched.
- Save time by having us audit your tech stack for inefficiencies
We offer two platform consulting packages from one-off assessments to ongoing fractional CTO-As-A-Service, so no matter what your budget get in touch to find out how we can help.
